A Twist in the Tale
by Speaker for the Dead aka 17
Summary: a.k.a. Writing Voyager Fanfic With A Writer's Blcok. Don't we all know this pain? Argh!! What should I put in the next line?!?


Writing a Voyager Short Story with a Writer's Block

**A Twist in the Tale**

**(a.k.a. Writing a _Voyager Short Story with a Writer's Block)_**

A short story by Lt. Taya 17 Janeway

_Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap._

The sound of her fingernail clicking impatiently against her glass table seemed to resonate throughout the empty room. She stared blankly at her screen, pondering the four words she had written so far in about as many hours:

**A _Voyager Short Story._**

That was it. The sum of her productivity for the past four hours. The damned thing didn't even have a proper name.

She'd never thought she'd sink to this level of boredom when she was confined home for one entire week, but here she was. Writing _Voyager stories, of all things. What a waste of time- who was she going to show them to anyhow? Not to mention the slight silliness she felt in writing such… puerile (for the want of a better name) material._

What the _hell had she been thinking when she started on this?_

She had some obscure form of the flu that nobody had ever heard of and nobody even bothered to inoculate anymore. Or, at least, that was about as much as she could make out from what the Doctor (she always thought of her doctor as _the doctor, with a capital D- she couldn't help it) said. He'd sent her home with a couple of drugs and a long directive of things to do and things NOT to do: no going outdoors, no sleeping late, no chocolate and no coffee(!) no strenuous activity, no working at home (don't you __dare, he had threatened)… _

He might have saved himself a lot of energy by just saying, "Stay at home and stare at a wall all day."

Well, he certainly couldn't expect her to sit watching newsreels and daytime soap operas all day. She gazed, somewhat ruefully, at the rectangular screen mounted on her wall. On bad days she liked to call it the telescreen and imagine that some dictatorial Big Brother was out there monitoring everything she watched. Well, not like there was much to watch in the first place. Entertainment these days was sensationalism on growth hormones and nothing much else. She'd go nuts if she just sat there watching twenty-four/seven-- she needed to use her brain every now and then. 

Then it had occurred to her to embark on this misguided endeavor. Sure, now that _Voyager was back in the Alpha Quadrant people weren't that interested in it anymore, but she knew there was still a market out there of people (fanatics, really, considering __some of them whom she either knew or had met) who would spare more than a few moments for stories like these. And well… it had seemed like an interesting idea. Writing a biography was easy. Fiction, on the other hand… didn't she always like to challenge herself?_

The tapping continued unabated. 

_Challenge. You got that right. How about impossibility?_

She rolled her eyes. What was _wrong with her? She'd never been at a loss for words in real life, so why was she stuck now? _

"Maybe if I just wrote a sentence the rest of the story will follow."

_It was just another ordinary day on the Starship Voyager. Commander Chakotay was on his way down to the Mess Hall when…_

_when…_

_when…_

Um.

_…the ship suddenly rocked violently._

No. Too typical, too unoriginal. She needed something unusual. 

[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]

_…he ran into Naomi Wildman, knocking her over._

Cruelty to children. That was bad- wouldn't go down to well with most readers. So. What else?

[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]

_…Q suddenly appeared in a typical flash of light._

Disgusting. She wouldn't even touch that topic.

[backspace][backspace][backspace][backspace]

_… he realized he'd forgotten to put on his pants._

She had to laugh out loud at that one. Simply ridiculous! It just went to show how far-gone her mind was. She had bounced from being boring, to cruel, to disgusting, to just plain idiotic. What kind of medicine _had the Doctor prescribed for her anyhow?_

"Alright, alright, I admit it! This isn't working. So what do you want me to do now?" _Talking to oneself is often considered a sign of insanity…_

She sighed and leaned back in her overstuffed chair, blowing air between her lips in frustration. Her living room was done in spartan, almost ascetic décor: everything was in shades of black and white, leaving nothing particularly interesting for her to fix her eyes on. She tried to recall long-forgotten Literature classes. What were the key components in every piece of work? Conflict, buildup, climax, conclusion… it wasn't really helping. Especially not when she heard the stentorian tones of her English teacher insidiously sneaking into her thought train (_"**No grasp of literary techniques whatsoever… can't even employ proper metaphors…")**_

What if she wrote a story about the captain of _Voyager trying to get over her writer's block when trying to write a __Voyager short story?_

Now, who would read that? No plot whatsoever. (_"Have you **ever heard of the concept of suspense? What I am supposed to do with students like these, I ask you!")**_

Shaking her head and conceding defeat, she decided to fall back on what had sustained her through her first six years of schooling- the good old brainstorm. She stood up and pushed the chair aside, heading for the patio. Last evening she'd tried to paint the sunset, but the sun had set too quickly for her to finish more than a third of the landscape, so she'd just abandoned the half-completed drawing, standing forlornly outside the house. She grabbed a piece of paper from the easel, and scrabbled in the tin container beside it for a charcoal stick. Messy, but it served its purpose.

This time she sat cross-legged on the thick carpet where the coffee table was. She put the paper down and scrawled across the middle: _Brainstorming for Voyager story ideas._

She studied her handiwork and decided she didn't like her handwriting. It was too mousy, and it looked like a series of chicken scratches. Thankfully she typed- or worked in typeface- more than she wrote. All hail the stylus, greatest invention of mankind.

She started drawing categories and sub-categories: "Romance", "Incredibly Mushy Romance", "Incredibly Mushy and Explicitly Graphic Romance"(There is no way I am _ever touching that, she thought as she wrote it), "Suspense", "Mystery/Romance", "Fantasy"(Now, what would __that be about, __Voyager accidentally ending up in a Tolkien novel?), "Science fiction"… wait, science fiction? Did she actually write that? What was today, the Day For Stating the Blindingly Obvious? She stared at the sheet of paper, now beginning to look like a storm had __really hit it. "I cannot believe people make a living out of writing these stories," she grumped out loud. Well, not really, but it was close. Shaking her head, she began scribbling down various ideas she'd thought of while trying to list the categories._

Five hours later she crumpled up the scribbled piece of paper in frustration and tossed it into the metal bin. "I am not doing this. It is a waste of my time, and I will be much better off reading scientific journals," she proclaimed, and went back to her workstation, banging her knee painfully on the underside of the coffee table as she stood up (_it just isn't my day, is it…)._

Five minutes later she was back, guiltily fishing the crumpled ball of paper out from the bin and smoothing it out. "I _have got to finish this. I said that I would, and I am going to." _

She sat back down at the coffee table and marked out three of the most promising plot lines she had come up with. One of them was a sappy romance story about Tom and B'Elanna (_Rolls eyes dramatically, she thought), the other was an adventure flick about (what else?) a misinformed and misguided alien culture mistaking __Voyager for bad guys, and the third was a disgustingly pointless comedic piece about another one of Neelix's cooking disasters. _

She re-examined the three plots again, trying to see how well each would fit into her Literature teacher's model story, while trying to screen out the derogatory remarks which accompanied the pointers. Finally she decided that the adventure story would be the simplest to write. 

_Well, nine hours have passed, and now the actual writing starts! **How exciting…**_

With the sad-looking sheet of paper beside her she sat in front of the computer screen and began typing, tentatively at first, but as she continued her writing gained momentum. Her story was a short epic extolling the bravery, courage and camaraderie of _Voyager crew. As she typed she could hear the voice of her Literature teacher going ballistic in her head, but she pointedly ignored it. The supposed two-page long story stretched over ten pages, and kept going._

By the time she had finished with the story she quite liked it. It was also ten p.m., and she knew she was going to get a scolding from the Doctor about it. No matter. She added a few finishing touches, saved the file, and attached a short message to it (something along the lines of _I was high when I wrote this, please read it no matter how silly it sounds and tell me what you think. Well, slightly more eloquently than that, but the meaning was the same). There. Finished._

She accessed her personal mail account and sent it to everyone on her mailing list. Now, all she had to do was to wait for them to start calling her, or worse still, start coming over with a psychiatrist to check her mental health.

She stretched and decided that she felt quite tired. Perhaps a long soak in a tub full of boiling hot water was in order. She pushed the screen of her workstation shut, and got up to run the said boiling hot water into the tub. Hmm. Maybe she'd play some light jazz music while she bathed, just to celebrate. And she was going to spend at least half an hour in that tub, nevermind that she would come out looking like a wrinkled ninety-year old prune after that. She'd been working for twelve solid hours: she needed to relax now.

When she came out of the bathroom half an hour later with a towel wrapped around her freshly washed hair (and yes, looking like a wrinkled ninety-year old prune), there was a message flashing on her console. So. Somebody had read it already? Hiding a smile she opened the message. It was short, to the point, and typed in very large font.

**KATHRYN, YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY TAKEN TOO MUCH OF WHATEVER THE DOCTOR HAS GIVEN YOU. GET SOME SLEEP AND SEE HIM FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING.**

**SIGNED, CHAKOTAY**

**(I LIKED THE STORY, BY THE WAY)**

** **

** **

She laughed. More messages were flashing on her screen now: from B'Elanna, Seven, the Doctor… probably ranting about her staying up so late when she should have been asleep. No matter. She was feeling an odd sense of achievement at the moment. It had taken her the whole day, but so what? She'd finally written her first _Voyager story. In the background she could hear her Literature teacher still going at maximun volume (__"Kathryn Janeway, if you **ever **_get the absurd idea of publishing fiction, all your readers are going to **throw up all over your writing! What kind of metaphor is "the beach of life"? ad nauseam, ad infinitum)_ It might have taken her forty years, but she had finally proved her teacher wrong. Like anything else, she __could write if she put her mind to it._**

"So, when do you think should I write my next magnum opus?"

**The End**


End file.
